Re: [Mingw-msys] about bash and autotools (autoconf)

Quoting Leon Zadorin (LZ), Greg Chicares (GC) and
Benjamin Smedburg (BS):
LZ> I was wo[n]dering as to why Msys does not, by default, have
LZ> bash - I have installed Msys 1.0.10 and, by default, Ffmpeg
LZ> refuses to build because it senses that there is no bash
LZ> present.
LZ> Having installed bash separately (i.e. as a separate package)
LZ> the problem was solved... but I was just wondering as to why
LZ> bash was not a part of default install in MinSYS...
I'm wondering why it is that so many people insist on calling
MSYS `MinSYS'? AFAIK, there is no such product as MinSYS; if
there is, it has nothing to do with MSYS, (which is correctly
spelled in all upper case letters). But, that aside...
MSYS *does* provide bash, and always has done; it just calls it
sh.exe, because that is what configure scripts are *supposed* to
require. I consider it a bug in Ffmpeg, if its configure script
requires anything beyond a basic Bourne shell.
GC> Click on the MSYS icon. Doesn't 'bash' come up?
LZ> rxvt comes up where if I type SET one of the outputs generated
LZ> is
LZ> SHELL=/bin/sh
LZ> and also
LZ> BASH=/bin/sh
And, within that rxvt, you *are* running bash, aliased to /bin/sh;
rxvt isn't a shell, (command line interpreter); it's an emulated
X-term, providing the window infrastructure in which the shell is
invoked; that shell *is* bash, but it is provided as /bin/sh.exe.
LZ> also, from memory (I shall repeat the whole install "from
LZ> scratch" to make sure ASAP), there was no bash.exe at all after
LZ> the default install of MinSYS...
And you still won't find bash.exe; in the spirit of our minimalist
project goals, we install only one shell, sh.exe, but...
BS> Yes, sh.exe is bash. Do you mean you need /bin/bash to exist?
BS> You could just copy sh.exe to bash.exe
Or, if you are using an NTFS file system, (usual for Win2K, XP):
$ (cd /bin && ln sh.exe bash.exe)
so you create a *hard* link, which works just as well, without
creating an extra copy of the file.
Regards,
Keith.